{"id":37280,"date":"2013-12-09T12:00:28","date_gmt":"2013-12-09T12:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=37280"},"modified":"2015-05-05T22:20:14","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T21:20:14","slug":"nsa-tracking-cellphone-locations-worldwide-snowden-documents-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/12\/nsa-tracking-cellphone-locations-worldwide-snowden-documents-show\/","title":{"rendered":"NSA Tracking Cellphone Locations Worldwide, Snowden Documents Show"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dec.\u00a04, 2013<\/i> – <\/b>The National Security Agency<\/a> is gathering nearly 5\u00a0billion records a day<\/a> on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals \u2014 and map their relationships \u2014 in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.<\/p>\n

The records feed a vast database<\/a> that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden<\/a>. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.<\/p>\n

(Video: How the NSA uses cellphone tracking to find and \u2018develop\u2019 targets)<\/a> <\/i><\/p>\n

The NSA does not target Americans\u2019 location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones \u201cincidentally,\u201d a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.<\/p>\n

One senior collection manager, speaking on the condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said \u201cwe are getting vast volumes\u201d of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data are often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year.<\/p>\n

In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs<\/a> that have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among the people using them.<\/p>\n

(Graphic: How the NSA is tracking people right now)<\/a> <\/i><\/p>\n

U.S. officials said the programs that collect and analyze location data are lawful and intended strictly to develop intelligence about foreign targets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said \u201cthere is no element of the intelligence community that under any authority is intentionally collecting bulk cellphone location information about cellphones in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

The NSA has no reason to suspect that the movements of the overwhelming majority of cellphone users would be relevant to national security. Rather, it collects locations in bulk because its most powerful analytic tools \u2014 known collectively as CO-TRAVELER<\/a> \u2014 allow it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.<\/p>\n

Still, location data, especially when aggregated over time, are widely regarded among privacy advocates as uniquely sensitive. Sophisticated mathematical tech\u00adniques enable NSA analysts to map cellphone owners\u2019 relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phone users who cross their paths. Cellphones broadcast their locations even when they are not being used to place a call or send a text message.<\/p>\n

(Video: Reporter Ashkan Soltani explains NSA collection of cellphone data)<\/a> <\/i><\/p>\n

CO-TRAVELER<\/a> and related tools require the methodical collection and storage of location data on what amounts to a planetary scale. The government is tracking people from afar into confidential business meetings or personal visits to medical facilities, hotel rooms, private homes and other traditionally protected spaces.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the key components of location data, and why it\u2019s so sensitive, is that the laws of physics don\u2019t let you keep it private,\u201d said Chris Soghoian<\/a>, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. People who value their privacy can encrypt their e-mails and disguise their online identities, but \u201cthe only way to hide your location is to disconnect from our modern communication system and live in a cave.\u201d<\/p>\n

The NSA cannot know in advance which tiny fraction of 1\u00a0percent of the records it may need, so it collects and keeps as many as it can \u2014 27 terabytes, by one account, or more than double the text content of the Library of Congress\u2019s print collection.<\/p>\n

The location programs have brought in such volumes of information, according to a May 2012 internal NSA briefing, that they are \u201coutpacing our ability to ingest, process and store\u201d data. In the ensuing year and a half, the NSA has been transitioning to a processing system that provided it with greater capacity.<\/p>\n

The possibility that the intelligence community has been collecting location data, particularly of Americans, has long concerned privacy advocates and some lawmakers. Three Democratic senators \u2014 Ron Wyden (Ore.), Mark Udall (Colo.) and Barbara A. Mikulski (Md.) \u2014 have introduced an amendment to the 2014 defense spending bill that would require U.S. intelligence agencies to say whether they have ever collected or made plans to collect location data for \u201ca large number of United States persons with no known connection to suspicious activity.\u201d<\/p>\n

NSA Director Keith B. Alexander disclosed in Senate testimony in October that the NSA had run a pilot project<\/a> in 2010 and 2011 to collect \u201csamples\u201d of U.S. cellphone location data. The data collected were never available for intelligence analysis purposes, and the project was discontinued because it had no \u201coperational value,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Alexander allowed that a broader collection of such data \u201cmay be something that is a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

The number of Americans whose locations are tracked as part of the NSA\u2019s collection of data overseas is impossible to determine from the Snowden documents alone, and senior intelligence officials declined to offer an estimate.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s awkward for us to try to provide any specific numbers,\u201d one intelligence official said in a telephone interview. An NSA spokeswoman who took part in the call cut in to say the agency has no way to calculate such a figure.<\/p>\n

An intelligence lawyer, speaking with his agency\u2019s permission, said location data are obtained by methods \u201ctuned to be\u00a0looking outside the United States,\u201d a formulation he repeated three times. When U.S. cellphone data are collected, he said, the data are not covered by the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures.<\/p>\n

According to top-secret briefing slides, the NSA pulls in location data around the world from 10 major \u201csigads,\u201d or signals intelligence activity designators.<\/p>\n

A sigad known as STORMBREW, for example, relies on two unnamed corporate partners described only as ARTIFICE and WOLFPOINT. According to an NSA site inventory, the companies administer the NSA\u2019s \u201cphysical systems,\u201d or interception equipment, and \u201cNSA asks nicely for tasking\/updates.\u201d<\/p>\n

STORMBREW collects data from 27 telephone links known as OPC\/DPC pairs, which refer to originating and destination points and which typically transfer traffic from one provider\u2019s internal network to another\u2019s. That data include cell tower identifiers, which can be used to locate a phone\u2019s location.<\/p>\n

The agency\u2019s access to carriers\u2019 networks appears to be vast.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany shared databases, such as those used for roaming, are available in their complete form to any carrier who requires access to any part of it,\u201d said Matt Blaze, an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. \u201cThis \u2018flat\u2019 trust model means that a surprisingly large number of entities have access to data about customers that they never actually do business with, and an intelligence agency \u2014 hostile or friendly \u2014 can get \u2018one-stop shopping\u2019 to an expansive range of subscriber data just by compromising a few carriers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some documents in the Snowden archive suggest that acquisition of U.S. location data is routine enough to be cited as an example in training materials. In an October 2012 white paper on analytic techniques, for example, the NSA\u2019s counterterrorism analysis unit describes the challenges of tracking customers who use two different mobile networks, saying it would be hard to correlate a user on the T-Mobile network with one on Verizon. Asked about that, a U.S. intelligence official said the example was poorly chosen and did not represent the program\u2019s foreign focus<\/a>. There is no evidence that either company cooperates with the NSA, and both declined to comment.<\/p>\n

The NSA\u2019s capabilities to track location are staggering, based on the Snowden documents, and indicate that the agency is able to render most efforts at communications security effectively futile.<\/p>\n

Like encryption and anonymity tools online, which are used by dissidents, journalists and terrorists alike, security-minded behavior \u2014 using disposable cellphones and switching them on only long enough to make brief calls \u2014 marks a user for special scrutiny. CO-TRAVELER<\/a> takes note, for example, when a new telephone connects to a cell tower soon after another nearby device is used for the last time.<\/p>\n

Side-by-side security efforts \u2014 when nearby devices power off and on together over time \u2014 \u201cassist in determining whether co-travelers are associated .\u2009.\u2009. through behaviorally relevant relationships,\u201d according to the 24-page white paper, which was developed by the NSA in partnership with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Australian Signals Directorate and private contractors.<\/p>\n

A central feature of each of these tools is that they do not rely on knowing a particular target in advance, or even suspecting one. They operate on the full universe of data in the NSA\u2019s FASCIA repository<\/a>, which stores trillions of metadata records, of which a large but unknown fraction include locations.<\/p>\n

The most basic analytic tools map the date, time, and location of cellphones to look for patterns or significant moments of overlap. Other tools compute speed and trajectory for large numbers of mobile devices, overlaying the electronic data on transportation maps to compute the likely travel time and determine which devices might have intersected.<\/p>\n

To solve the problem of un\u00addetectable surveillance against CIA officers stationed overseas, one contractor designed an analytic model that would carefully record the case officer\u2019s path and look for other mobile devices in steady proximity.<\/p>\n

\u201cResults have not been validated by operational analysts,\u201d the report said.<\/p>\n

___________________________<\/p>\n

Julie Tate contributed to this report. Soltani is an independent security researcher and consultant. <\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a9 The Washington Post Company<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 washingtonpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dec. 4, 2013 – The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals \u2014 and map their relationships \u2014 in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}